In computing networks, data is transmitted from a source to a destination in the form of packets. These packets generally pass through one or more network devices, such as switches, routers, firewalls, etc. Certain customers, such as those in the financial sector, demand network architectures that provide low latency and high integration with low costs. The latency of a network device is the difference between the arrival time and the departure time of a packet. As such, latency may be measured as the time between the time that a first bit of a packet (i.e., the packet head) arrives at an ingress port and the time that the first bit of the packet departs from an egress port.
Network devices may perform one or more operations that introduce latency into the packet transmission process. These operations may include, for example, Layer 2 (L2) and/or Layer 3 (L3) forwarding, Network Address Translation (NAT), and L2/L3/Layer 4 (L4) access control list (ACLs) operations, etc.